


Steve Rogers is confounded by Christmas cookies, and Loki has a cat

by peterqpan



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Christmas Cookies, Christmas Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 10:40:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13212045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterqpan/pseuds/peterqpan
Summary: ETA:  Since it brought enjoyment instead of dismay, the previous title (The Christmas Special You Neither Needed Nor Deserved) is wrong!  Enjoyment was entirely deserved!This is a lot of both metaphorical and literal frosting.  Warning for SPAM, I guess?  This takes place in a muddy "A Good While Later" when everyone's more at ease.  Finally finishing this due to inspiration from the week-old frosted Christmas cookie I found in my purse!  LUCKY!Merry Christmas (late)!





	Steve Rogers is confounded by Christmas cookies, and Loki has a cat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra (Haych_Aych_Ach)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haych_Aych_Ach/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Wandering Child](https://archiveofourown.org/works/768874) by [wanderingchild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingchild/pseuds/wanderingchild). 



Steve surveyed the enormous pile of clearly-labeled flour, butter, sugar, spice jars, and eggs, the mysterious bright tubes unhelpfully labeled things like "Blue" and "Pink", and a particularly confounding container of what appeared to be ball-bearings and was labeled "edible", then let his eyes lift to Tony Stark, who was unloading a bag of books with titles like "Best 50 Christmas Treats" and "Britain Calls Them Biscuits".  Tony met his eyes, upending a metallic crash of small shapes on the table and shaking the paper bag out like a bullfighter's cape.  A steel outline of an automatic rifle bounced off the table near Steve's foot.

"We've made a few shapes since your time," he picked up and flicked over a spider shape, then cackled and held up star-centered shield, waggling his eyebrows.  "Dunno what Sarah Rogers made, but there should be enough there," he pointed proudly, and Steve nodded slowly.  "I carefully selected an omnipotent space fairy!"  Tony held up a cross shape with an actual Jesus outline inside.  "Wasn't sure how you'd feel about baking his corpse, though, there's a cross and a fish and a star and a whole nativity, so you can also bake a baby and his whole family and his pet sheep?"  He slapped Steve's shoulder, grimaced, and shook his hand out, randomly handing Steve packages of "frosting tips", a bottle of  cognac, and what appeared to be edible cross-shaped confetti.

One thing Sarah Rogers had made was a boy with manners.  "Thank you, Tony."

"Pepper says not to make you an oven," Tony whirred around the modernly independent mid-kitchen countertop, piling up bags of dried...hibiscus flowers?  "You probably need one you're familiar with, anyway, chrome and a huge dial.  Maybe wood-burning.  Dragon fire.  How old are you again?"

"Bucky used to say I couldn't be Catholic, I was the guy they named Protestants for, so I guess five-hundred," Steve said blankly, wondering why the little hardened squirts of chocolate and peanut butter were referred to as "chips".  

After the Stark-brand whirlwind passed, Steve stood feeling shell-shocked in an apron and padded mitts, several bowls and a glass measuring cup balanced on the flat pans in his arms.  "Captain Cook," Loki's voice came in the door, and Steve frowned down to read his apron, carefully sliding the pyramid of cookware onto the stove.  

"Guess so."

"...so you're become the domestic help," Loki flipped open 'Martha Stewart's Christmas', then side-eyed Steve's baking mittens.  The guard following him bore an indulgent Flora, who eyed the precarious pile of metal shapes with the aura of one biding her time.  "...you are preparing a feast?  I have never seen how you feast.  It looks fragile."  

"I wonder," Steve was looking across the table vaguely.  "Jarvis, seven times is too many for 'Jingle Bells'."  The volume lowered as the song changed to 'I'll be Home for Christmas,' and Steve's lungs contracted into what was vaguely a laugh.

"Has Stark...grievance with his usual cook?"  Loki wrinkled his nose at a particularly silvery assemblage of mason jars, pine cones, and candles.  Steve's brain made the easy shift from imagining Bucky's melodramatic warble about dreaming of home, to imagining his loud snort at the idea of decorating for Christmas with candles in canning jars, as though they were decorating the mess hall and had decided on death by fire hazard instead of raucous caroling.

"It's a ritual...now, for a day we celebrate." Steve huffed a laugh at Loki's inquiring disdain.  "You're supposed to make a big meal with...friends."  He opened his mouth to clarify, then remembered Natasha's  'Convenient for us he was too arrogant to read up on what symbols to use to make humanity worship him.'  

The guard, new but apparently experienced with cats, was dissuading Flora from chewing the flaps of her uniform pockets.  "Did he just demand you make everyone cookies, sir?  Do you bake?"  At Steve's slow grimace, her smile widened.  "Have you _ever_  baked, sir?"

"In the kitchen, I'm Steve," he focused on not squashing her hand, as she introduced herself as Eun-Jae Kim, and he let Loki's judgement of the magazine woman's house drown out the Andrews Sisters summoning ghosts of USO shows past.  "Mrs. Roebling on the corner gave us some Tollhouse cookies once, when we carried her tree up the three storeys.  I'd never tasted butter before.  I've baked...bean loaf."

Loki scoffed at her, rolling his eyes in his new, wide knowledge of Midgard.  "You can have had no cow for the milk, obviously.  They are not suited for stairs."  His guard snorted, coughing, and Loki's eyes narrowed, but his attention returned as Flora had to be dissuaded from chewing the pages.

"It was the Depression, we pulled dandelions out of the sidewalks for salad, and stewed chicken feet we got on the cheap," Steve watched her newly-minted bean-loaf-grimace widen around the cat paws pressing at her face.  Flora arched her back, leaning her head out towards the pile of metal shapes with a frustrated whine, and Kim snorted, turning away to let her try that direction.

"My grandma still chops up hot dogs and SPAM in _everything,_ " the other guard, Williams, stared at visions of Depression 'sugarplums' in horror.

"They told us SPAM was nutritious!"  Steve looked over the table again.  "At...my mother made raisin gelatin with walnuts for Christmas," Steve suggested.  "I know how to make that."

"That sounds foul," Natasha said from the doorway, attracted by the unexpected carols blaring from the room.

Agent Kim grimaced.  "How would you even do that without a blender, were they just...boiled until they were slime, or--"

"Sometimes we used prunes," Steve sounded affable, smiling at the mitts.  "I helped with baking once in France.  There was a goat Dum Dum would run across the field every morning to milk into his helmet. He got shot at, but he never got hit.  That December when we broke down the rations the Commandos took all the sugar out and said it got lost, and they used the sugar and the milk and baked up a bunch of apple pies on Christmas.  Sent runners to the gunners and everywhere.  I got the credit for the apple pie, but really I was off with the goat.  They knew what I could handle."

"So, you will not be making a feast," Loki's lips thinned. He closed the book.  Flora batted at the page.  

"If you need  _help_ , sir, you've only to ask,"  Williams rolled their eyes.  "I hereby volunteer to save us all from bean prune SPAM loaf."

"It's not to be missed," Steve's eyes widened sincerely as Kim made a disgusted noise into the cat, Natasha's face went blank, and Loki opened his mouth, intrigued, before pausing.  "There are some here that require a branding iron," he announced.  "They're called rosettes."  

"A what?"  Steve leaned in to see the delicate snowflakes, dubious eyebrows raised.  "...they look sorta nice."  

"You boil them in oil," Loki said with relish.  

"How festive," Natasha wandered closer.  "Does anyone carry a branding iron?"  

"I'm sure Tony has one for the house cow," Steve kept his face straight, though Loki's eyes narrowed suspiciously.  "What is 'spam'?" he asked Kim, quietly, as Williams rolled up their sleeves and loudly cleared their throat before beginning to issue orders.  In moments, Steve and Natasha were clearing a space and assembling the least weird ingredients, and Loki was suggesting recipes to Kim, who appeared to be rejecting everything as too much trouble.

"Just make the dough and eat it with a spoon.  Cookies in their natural state.  No dishes."

Williams stared at her.  

"You sound like my _brother_ ," Loki sneered at the page.

"It's the way of the wild," Kim whispered, brandishing one of Flora's paws.  

Soon, the smell of baking drew Bruce and Thor, who were put to work carefully rolling out dough.  Their first transparent attempt downed Williams, who was laughing too hard to continue looking at everyone through it.  As crispy-edged shapes piled up around Natasha, she tucked her hair behind one ear, and began carefully colouring the people in green and purple and patriotic, with smudgy little emoticon growl faces.  Clint leaned against the wall watching Loki, who was listening to Kim's story of The Little Gingerbread Man and covering a series of cookies in little frosting runes, as Flora hung over Kim's arm like a thoroughly mistreated and depressed pelt.  "More frosting," Kim demanded, grabbing a cookie Natasha's elbow had turned Impressionist.

Steve set the "edible" ball bearings down near Loki's frosting station.  "If any of those run anywhere, I'm sure Tony needs these most."  Loki's mouth twitched, before he inspected the bottle dismissively.  

"This is a very obvious trap."

"Actually he wanted you to feel traditional," Williams gasped.  "We should put beans on them.  PruneSPAM."

" _What_  is _prunespam_ ," Loki asked irritably, as several present groaned, Bruce pausing entirely to stare over.

"I'm sure Williams will make you some," Natasha said flatly, applying a lumpy line across the face of what had probably been a cat.  Williams shuddered.

"This is definitely tastier than my traditions," Steve watched Thor trying to gently sprinkle flour.

"When is the feast?" Thor accepted one of Natasha's masterpieces and turned it over in his hands, frowning, then held it upside-down, with no noticeable recognition, as the artist distractedly pulled the coloured tubes away from Flora's grappling paws.  Bruce leaned in to see the cookie, frowning critically.

"Ah.  That looks...delicious, you should eat it right away," he cleared his throat warily, still frowning at the cookie in bemusement.

"This is the feast," Williams said.  "There are probably at least prunes in all this, though, should we decorate him something with prunes?  Oh no, wait, we could make thumbprint cookies with the extra dough, with prunes in it!"  

"Stop wasting food," Kim hove Flora off Loki's head and over her shoulder.  Having scrabbled thoroughly at his ears, the cat seemed satisfied.

Loki leaned to release a line of red-and-green frosted cookies with brilliantly shiny decorations from his hands onto the floor, some rolling, some walking, some inchworming in a way that had Kim stepping to one side and taking Flora to watch Thor crouching next to the boards so as to gauge the depth of dough.  Clint stepped well out of range.  "They'll run for weeks," Loki said proudly, and Bruce abruptly began washing his hands, eyes widening in fear for his lab, as the elevator in the hallway chimed.  "He'll never catch the gingerbread man,"  Loki proclaimed creepily, staggering half off his stool as Thor clapped his shoulder.

"Flora will love Stark's Christmas pixies!  How long of a head start?"  He beamed.

Loki eyed the cat speculatively, beginning to smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I believe the Red Room's intensive training would still not have prepared Natasha to be a proficient patissier. 
> 
> When they find Bucky, his apron will say "Grill Sergeant."


End file.
